Sega Pluto console goes up for auction on eBay

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Last month there was a bit of excitement in the retro gaming community when not one, but two prototype Sega Pluto consoles were discovered. Neither one was final hardware, but hinted at Sega’s intention to release an updated version of the Saturn including a modem. That never happened and only two of these prototypes were produced. Now one of them has gone up for auction on eBay.

The prototype being sold is actually the second one that hit the headlines last month. Where as the first was owned by a former Sega employee and is in perfect condition, the second one was acquired for $1 at a flea market and has a lid that doesn’t stay closed. Importantly though, it is fully functional as long as you put weight on the lid to keep it shut.

The eBay auction started at $100, but has increased to $5,000 with 44 bids already made and 4 days still to go. However, the seller has set a high reserve and already failed to sell the console in a previous auction using GameGavel. In that auction the bidding reached $7,600, but failed to reach the reserve (see the comments below for clarification on this point).

Whether the console sells this time depends on how high that reserve is. The fact the seller only paid a dollar for the machine and the lid is faulty suggests to me that $5,000 is a very good price to accept. I’d guess the reserve is somewhere around the $10,000 mark in which case I think he’ll be keeping it for a while longer.

The gaming community wants access to the Pluto so they can open it up and take a look at the components. It doesn’t seem to be a standard Saturn board, so there’s a lot of interest in the internals of the machine.